"You used to be always wishing you were big," remarked her now big brother.
"Y—es, so I was; but I never meant all at once. I wanted to be big enough to spin—and the—mother—was—going—to teach me," went on poor Pierotte, crying bitterly, "and I wanted to be as big as Laura Blaize—and—pretty—and some day have a sweetheart, as she had—and—but what's the use—I've lost it all, and I'm grown up, and old and ugly already, and the mother won't know me, and the father will say, 'My little Pierotte—Cœur de St. Martin—impossible! get out, you witch!'" Overcome by this dreadful picture, Pierotte hid her face and cried louder than ever.
"I'll tell you what," said Pierot, after a pause, "don't let us go home at all. We will just hide here in the woods for a year, and when Midsummer's Day comes round, we'll hunt till we find the fairy house again, and beg the fairy, on our knees, for another wish, and if she says 'yes,' we'll wish at once to be little just as we were this morning, and then we'll go home directly."
"Poor mother; she will think we are dead!" sighed Pierotte.
"That's no worse than if she saw us like this. I'd be conscripted most likely and sent off to fight, and me only twelve years old! And you'd have a horrid time of it with the Blaize boys. Robert Blaize said you were the prettiest girl in Balne aux Bois. I wonder what he'd say now!"
"Oh, yes, let us stay here," shuddered Pierotte. "I couldn't bear to see the Blaize boys now. But then—it will be dark soon—shan't you be frightened to stay in the woods all night?"
"Oh! a man like me isn't easily frightened," said Pierot, stoutly, but his teeth chattered a little.
"It's so queer to hear you call yourself 'a man,'" remarked Pierotte.
"And it's just as queer to hear you call yourself a little girl," answered Pierot, with a glance at the antiquated face beside him.
"Dear, how my legs shake, and how stiff my knees are!" sighed Pierotte. "Do grown-up people feel like that always?"